Xin Nian Kuai Le Travels

February ushered in the Year of the Pig, an ever increasingly busy pipeline at work and many happy travels.

China shuts down entirely during the week of Chinese New Year (February 19 – 23 this year). Eager to escape the urban grit, Ela Ben-Ur (Boston), Travis Lee (Chicago), Evan Shapiro (Chicago) and I took a week long trip to Guangxi Province in southern China to celebrate Chinese New Year.

Unlike Shanghai - untouched by western traditions of Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day, rural China celebrates Chinese New Year like it was meant to be celebrated. This was the one time of year you could party and set off firecrackers all hours of the night, receive new clothes and housewares, slaughter pigs to provide you with meat for the year, get married and indulge in food and wine. In the cities, where people are richer, the celebrations are less intense now since people don’t have to wait until Chinese New Year to indulge.

Chengyang is a cluster of eight Dong minority villages on the Guizhou and Guangxi boarder: PicasaWeb CHENGYANG Album



Longsheng is a cluster of Yao minority villages tucked away in a vast range of rice terraces: PicasaWeb LONGSHENG Album



Yangshou is in the middle of Guangxi province and is famous for its Karst Mountain Range and cormorant fishermen: PicasaWeb YANGSHUO Album




A week of many firsts, the four of us ate and drank ‘bai jiu’ (rice wine) with old men, danced in front of the drum tower, dragged firecrackers into the wooden house of the wedding party we were about to crash, learned to play chinese chess (and then promptly got our asses whooped by a 11 year old boy from Guangzhou), trailed brides carrying water from the well, trailed the brides’ parties as they carried rice, half pig carcasses and mirrors to the husbands’ houses, saw people strap amazing things to the backs of their motorcycles (from cilantro to live chickens), followed a water buffalo up into the rice terraces, chatted with village leaders about Hilary Clinton, climbed up a Karst peak, held a fisherman’s cormorant, and mud bathed inside a cave.

I am still digging mud out of my ears.

For sights and sounds – a video clip . . .